Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Logline Critique Round One #13

TITLE: Crossmatch
GENRE: Women's Fiction

When an affluent homemaker’s dire need for a kidney transplant reveals how unsupportive her husband is, two men from her past emerge to help in her quest for survival. This leads her to finding a perfect match, but her suffering compounds when her life can be saved – but only at a cost.

7 comments:

I agree — I think specifics about what the cost is would help quite a bit. Without knowing what the cost is, it's hard to know how difficult her decision would be and how much to care. Also, I'm a bit hung up on the brief mention of a husband that doesn't care his wife may die without a kidney transplant. Without more information, it feels a little unbelievable. Maybe you could keep the logline to the search for the kidney and the cost of the one they found. That seems more critical to the hook than the husband's refusal to help.

I agree that the first sentence isn't bad, but the second one has some problems. The verb 'compounds' isn't used correctly here -- a problem is 'compounded by' something -- and the details are too vague. See if you can rewrite this so it's a little more specific.

Also, I know it's not always necessary in a logline, but I think it usually makes a reader feel more connected and more interested in finding out about a character if you include their name.

This would be stronger if you made it more personal and specific. What does this husband do to prevent her from surviving? And by "surviving" I'm assuming you mean getting a transplant before day X, but it would help to know that. Also, the last sentence is a bit too vague which makes it lose its strength. Is the cost someone else's life or her marriage or an actual financial cost? This is your real conflict so you want to spell it out.

Okay, I see some stakes here--she needs a kidney transplant or she'll die. The rest uses a lot of words but doesn't give me the information I need. What does her husband do to show he's unsupportive? Does he dump her? Refuse to be tested to see if he's a possible donor? What, exactly? If it isn't important enough to explain, it doesn't need to be mentioned. When you say "perfect match," do you mean romantically or as a donor or both? Is the perfect match one of the two men from her past? And then you're about to raise the stakes, which is good, but you go all vague instead. What cost? What happens to make things worse? I think this one needs more of the right kind of specific details to make it clear.

I sympathized with your MC in the first sentence, but by the end, I was left wondering what she does for herself. This is her story, but it seems like the only people who move the plot forward are the various men in her life. (I'm pretty sure that's not true in the book, just the way it's coming off in the logline.